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One symbol of this was a play, The Year 2000, written in 1789 by Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, a prolific author and polemicist who functioned in the literary demimonde between the great philosophers and the pornographic hacks. In preceding years he had addressed voluminous suggestions to the Estates General for legal and constitutional reforms, including an embryonic welfare state with workers' insurance, retirement funds, free medical care and education. The play itself projected an ideal community in which marriage has been purged of all crass commercialism and bridegrooms are chosen by a council of elders according to merit, military or otherwise. Married couples are kept apart for years to ensure the survival of their passion. Society as a whole, under a benign king, is perfectly just, even though--or perhaps because--lawyers have been eliminated. The King declares, "In the year 2000, virtue never goes unrewarded!"
By the 19th century, visions of the future had come to be dominated by the machine, belching steam and later sparking electricity. This is what inspired Jules Verne, the first major prophet of technology, who was born a generation after the French Revolution and lived until 1905. A bourgeois stockbroker who became fascinated by science, he noted near the end of his life that he had been present at the birth of railroads, trams, the electric light, the telegraph, the telephone and the phonograph, not to mention postage stamps and detachable collars.
In his books, Verne always tried to stay within the limits of what he considered scientifically plausible. Apart from his major works (Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth), he wrote a fantasy about the year 2000 titled An Ideal City. The story is full of mechanical gimmicks: streets are cleaned automatically, recitals are conveyed from the artist by wire to pianos around the world, babies get their milk from steam-driven breast-feeding machines. The trains of women's gowns, having grown absurdly long, move on little wheels (one of the rare touches of humor in futurist writing). But much of the emphasis is less on physical than on social engineering: bachelors are taxed to prod them into marriage; physicians are paid for healthy patients rather than sick ones.
Social engineering became a dominant theme in the futurist imagination, and increasingly its symbol was 2000. It was the year chosen by Edward Bellamy for his projection of the future America in Looking Backward, published in 1888. The book instantly became immensely popular, obviously filling an emotional need in a country that was beset by strikes, battles between workers and police and proliferating industrial trusts. Bellamy, the son of a Baptist minister, was revolted by the brutality of contemporary capitalism and the misery it caused. He believed relief must come not through promises of heaven but--in the Utopian tradition--by building something like heaven on earth.